Students Find Engineering Role Models at FIRST

Here at the FIRST Robotics Championship in Atlanta, Ga., the students wear team t-shirts, jumpsuits, flowing capes and tick costumes. They wear pig ears, tiger hoods, foam daisy headbands and hard hats with narwhal tusks glued to them. They dye their hair blue, green and hot pink. And so do some of the adult teachers and engineers who serve as their mentors.

The infectious enthusiasm surrounding FIRST extends to—and sometimes starts with—the 40,000 volunteer mentors who work closely with the teams. "It's a lot of fun," says Justin Ridley, an International Space Station flight controller. Ridley started out on Team RUSH as a junior in high school, became a mentor when he went to college, and then joined the Robonauts when he started his job with NASA in Houston. "We build a lot of really cool stuff," he says. "And as a flight controller I don't do a lot of hard core engineering, so it gives me an outlet for that."

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NASA alone supports 312 FIRST Robotics teams. Saturday afternoon the space agency's administrator, Charlie Bolden, stood on the sidelines during the division finals, clearly enjoying the high-energy fray. "This is absolutely incredible," he said. He'd already cruised the pits where he spoke with students about their robots, but mentors were quick to tell their stories too. "All of them talk about what they get out of it," Bolden says. "It brings a sense of satisfaction, knowing it makes a difference in their communities. They also recognize the fact that they're very proud of what they do and it gives them an opportunity to share their type of work with kids."

My own trip through the pits resulted in conversations with the father/son mentor team of Bill and David Berggren, who started The Holy Cows as educators in San Diego, Calif., and the mother/daughter team of Cathy and Cassie Beck, who mentor the Cybersonics in Kintnersville, Pennsylvania. Cassie, also a FIRST alumn, is a sophomore at St. Joseph's University, majoring in accounting and decision system sciences. She's shared her own love of math with the kids. "We did a statistical analysis of success," she says. "Does it lie in numbers? Is it qualitative or quantitative?" The students figured out winning didn't depend on how many students or even seniors were on the team; it was based on qualities like teamwork.

"We have some fantastic mentors," says Kai Kuspa, a senior with the Aluminum Narwhals from San Diego—including a physics teacher with a degree in aeronautical engineering and an oceanographic engineer at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. As a result, the rookie team not only made it to nationals, it's exploded at school. "We started out with only eight kids this year. Now we're up to 60," Kuspa says. "We're the biggest group on campus. Not only do we have enough [students] to fill up an engineering class, we have enough to fill two engineering classes, an extra AP computer science class, and game design and physics classes." Plus, because the Aluminum Narwhals' robot had to be built in someone's garage, local politicians pledged to build a machine shop at the school.

According to the report "Engineering in K-12 Education," published by the National Academy of Sciences in 2009, engineering education up to grade 12 is ad hoc. There's no reliable data on the number of students who have been exposed to engineering-related coursework, or the number of teachers involved in K-12 engineering education. "No standards have been set for engineering education, no state or national assessment has been adopted, and almost no attention has been paid to engineering education by policy makers," the authors write. "In fact, engineering might be called the missing letter in STEM [Science, Technology, Engineering and Math]."

FIRST mentors, who range from employees of companies like Boeing, Autodesk and Johnson & Johnson to independent machine shop owners, can play a valuable role in filling this void, working side by side with students to help them learn basic engineering principles—and other skills, too. "I try to get them involved with some of our sponsors," says Katherine Dougan, a program manager at Northrup Grumman and mentor for the C Company in Maryland. "As an engineer, communications is extremely important." Her students visit corporate headquarters and give presentations, learning business and marketing as well.

FIRST is now nearly 20 years old, and though students graduate from teams every year, the mentors overwhelmingly tend to stay. "Each year I come back because I know we have a very safe program for kids to learn and to grow—to fail and to learn from those failures," says Kyle Hughes, a math teacher who has mentored Team RUSH in Clarkston, Michigan, for 14 years. "FIRST is all about failing faster. If you go from one regional to the next, you'll see robots improving and changing. That is such an [important] experience for these kids."

The dedication of these adults is not lost on the students. When asked what she took away from being on a FIRST team, Qurat Ali, a senior with the Iron Maidens from the Bronx High School of Science, told me: "I really learned to appreciate the mentors ...They provide you with the stability and resources that you need. The good mentors are the ones who listen to you and help you find a way to achieve your goals. Just having been able to experience that—I don't know if most people do." In turn, she tells me, the members of the Iron Maidens mentored four rookie FIRST Lego League teams and a FIRST Robotics team. "It's amazing that you can inspire someone," she says.